Hayden White

The Practical Past

“Fiction is the repressed other of history.”

Michel de Certeaui

Near the beginning of W. G. Sebald’s “novel,” Austerlitz, we are introduced to the

book’s eponymous protagonist, “Jacques Austerlitz,” by the narrator who has journeyed
to “Belgium” and specifically to “Antwerp”--“partly for study purposes, partly for other
reasons which were never entirely clear”—has ended up in the waiting room of the
central railway station (the “Salle des pas perdus”) where he encounters Austerlitz
taking pictures of the waiting room and engages him in conversation about the history
of architecture which happens to be Austerlitz’s profession. Thus began, the story has
it, in the year 1967, a series of encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz who, it
turns out, is searching for information about his family which, he had discovered only at
the age of sixteen, were Czech Jews who may (or may not) have perished in the death
camps of the Third Reich. The novel relates the many, accidental and planned
encounters between the narrator and Austerlitz from that first meeting in the “Salle des
pas perdus” in Antwerp Station down to a final meeting in Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris
where Jacques Austerlitz relates to the narrator the ways by which the past is able to
hide its secrets from the living, even to the point of destroying the monuments attesting
the existence of a past (as in the newly built Biblioteque Nationale in Paris : “this
gigantic new library, which, according to one of the loathsome phrases now current is
supposed to serve as the treasure house of our entire literary heritage, proved useless
in my search for any traces of my father who had disappeared from Paris more than
fifty years ago.”) It is not clear whether Austerlitz objects to the inutility of the new
Biblioteque Nationale or is simply lamenting the loss of the old one. In any event,
Jacques Austerlitz’s quest for the identity and traces of his parents takes the form of a

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journey in space, from one “lieu de memoir” to another each of them manifests another
aspect of how what had once been presented as a “heritage” can be shown to be a kind
of impediment to useful knowledge of the past. The ultimate destination (or rather the
penultimate one) is Theresienstadt’s famous Potemkin’s village concentration camp
where the transit point to the death camps was given the public face of a vacation spa
like Marienbad. This masquerade of a concentration camp as a fancy retirement
community provides a kind of image of fulfillment for all of the places of Europe
wherein the good old values of Humanism and Christianity, of the nation and the
community, the state and the church are allowed to appear as little more than
“zoological gardens” in which hapless captured animals look out listlessly at the human
visitors who think they occupy zones of freedom and responsibility.
Right at the beginning of Austerlitz, the narrator (before encountering Austerlitz
in the Central Station in Antwerp) visits the “Nocturama” of the Antwerp zoo. The
Nocturama is an enclosure for animals which sleep during the day and come out only at
night and whose eyes are unseeing in daylight but percipient in darkness. The narrator
opens his account of his meeting with Austerlitz in a meditation on the eyes of animals
which can see only in the dark and likens them to the eyes of philosophers, such as
Wittgenstein (a picture of whose eyes appears in the text), who teach us to see in
images rather than in concepts. This section is followed by a long account, first of the
proportions and decorations of the waiting room in Antwerp’s Central Station, next, of
the structure, appearance, and history of a series of military fortifications built around
Antwerp which went from being utterly ineffectual in defense of the city (and being
expanded and augmented with every failure until they became so extensive that they
could not be manned) to their use as a Gestapo prison and torture facility during the
Second World War. The fortifications of Fort Breendonck serve as a kind of master
metaphor of Sebald’s narrator’s report of Jacques Austerlitz’s journey across post-World
War II Europe in his effort to use his expert historical knowledge to establish his own
identity or at least that aspect of it that might come with knowledge of his origins.

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 If Austerlitz is, as the cover of the German edition informs us, a “Roman,” it is a
novel in which nothing very much happens, which lacks anything remotely resembling a
plot or plot structure (the “failed quest” novel?), and in which everything would seem to
turn, in Henry James fasion, on “character,” except that, in the cases of both Austerlitz
and his narrator, the notion of “character” itself explodes into the shards and fragments
of “men without properties.” And yet, the book is chock full of interesting not to say
fascinating historical information, lore and knowledge. The narrator stages Austerlitz’s
expertise in his professional field (art history) in a convincing manner and his
descriptions of the various historical monuments and sites (lieux) of famous historical
events are utterly “realistic” in the common meaning of that term. The meaning of this
“Roman” emerges in the interstices of the successive descriptions of places and edifices
that attest to the ways in which “civilization” has been built on the structures of evil,
incarceration, exclusion, destruction, and the kind of humiliation endured by that little
raccoon which, in the pale light of the Nocturama, “sat beside a little stream with a
serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if
it hoped (als offe er) that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable
thoroughness (weit uber jede vernunftige Grundlichkeit ), would help it to escape the
unreal world (aus der faslchen Welt) in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no
fault of its own (ohne sein eigenes Zutun).” (English ed., p 4 /German ed., pp. 10-11)
The predominance in Sebald’s book of real-world, which is to say, historical,
empirical, and documentable, “fact,” makes it difficult to classify it as “fiction.”
“Literature” or literary writing it certainly is; it is as self-consciously “fashioned” and
assertive of its “techniques” as any recognizably “poetic” artifact could be. At the same
time, all this artifice is being used to give access to a real, historical referent: what
Benjamin might recognize as an account of what our vaunted “civilization” owes for its
benefits and advantages to modern man’s peculiar forms of cruelty to its own kind. In
other words, the literary devices disposed by Sebald in Austerlitz serve to produce a
fictional lens by which to justify a judgment (ethical or moral in kind) on a real world of
historical fact. It has to be said that there is no “argument” that we might extract from

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the book regarding the “true” nature of the historical world thus displayed before us by
means of the narrator’s account of the “fictional” quest of Jacques Austerlitz for
information about his “fictional” parents. Or rather that, if there is an argument to be
extracted from it, it is one that can only be inferred from the way the events reported
over the course of the (non) action are encoded figuratively. To be sure, every narrative
or every account of a series of events related in a narrativizing manner, which is to say,
given the shape and form of a story, can be translated into an apparatus purely
conceptual in nature, after the manner in which Lakoff treats all metaphorical
statements (i.e., as masked concepts). But it has to be stressed that what gives to
Sebald’s account of a real historical world the aspect of fictionality is precisely the way
he resists any impulse to conceptualize either his narrator’s role or the “meaning” of his
protagonist’s “imaginary” journey in search of a lost origin.
On the other hand, this book is manifestly not a history even though its
“content” and its ultimate referent is manifestly “the historical” which means, one
might argue, that the book, quite apart from the melancholy which arises from the
suggestion that a merely “historical” knowledge of “history” will raise more problems
than it solves when it is a matter of seeking a meaning for an individual life or existence.
Again, as with Walter Benjamin, the story of Jacques Austerlitz’s inquiry into the recent
past of Europe seems to reveal only that the people who have “made history” were—
like the Nazis-- as much interested in hiding evidence of their deeds as they were in
celebrating and monumentalizing their intentions. It turns out that, if we can draw any
lessons from contemplation of the Austerlitz story, there is no such thing as a “history”
against which we could measure and assess the validity of what Amos Funkenstein calls
“antihistory,” by which he meant “mythifications” intended to cover over and obcure
the “truths” of proper historiography. It is all antihistory, always written as much
“against” as well as on behalf of “the truth.”
So maybe we might classify Austerlitz as a historical novel, a kind of
postmodernist version of the genre invented (so the legend has it) by Sir Walter Scott
and brought to consummation in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which, so it seems to me, at

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once consummates and “deconstructs” the genre of the historical novel as it had been
cultivated at the hands of Scott, Manzoni, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert,
and God knows how many others in the nineteenth century in Europe. We could say
that except for the fact that Austerlitz can be read as an allegory of the impossibility of
or, to cite Nietzsche, the disadvantage (Nachteil) of history “fur das Leben.” As thus
envisaged, Sebald’s “novel” can be viewed as a contribution in a peculiarly
postmodernist mode to that discussion over the relation between history and literature,
or factual and fictional writing, or realistic and imaginative or rational and mythical
writing opened up by the so-called “crisis of historism” (Historismus) in the early 20th
century. And if our purpose this evening were to enter into that discussion we would
have to account for the fact that the genre of the historical novel in the time of Scott,
Goethe, and Byron enjoyed virtually universal popularity among the literate public
while, at the same time, enduring universal contemnation at the hands of professional
historians who regarded its mixture of fact with fiction, its constitutive anachronism,
and its attempt to examine the past by the instruments of imagination as a crime not to
say a sin of Mosaic amplitude—“Thou shalt not mix the kinds.” The fact that the
authority and prestige of this literary genre waned with the constitution of a new kind of
science in the late nineteenth century, underwent a mindbending transformation at the
hands of the great literary modernists (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Proust, Kafka, Virginia
Woolf, etc. etc.), only to be revived in a different mode and register by virtually every
writer that we might wish to praise or condemn with the label “postmodernist.” As
Linda Hutcheon and Amy Elias have demonstrated (to my satisfaction, at least) the
dominant genre of postmodernist writing is “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon) or
simply “metahistorical romance” (Elias).
It has to be said that the rebirth of the historical novel in the forms given it by
writers as different as Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, V), De Lillo (Libra, Underground),
Philip Roth (American Pastoral, The Plot Against America), the Israeli writer Michaw
Govrin (Snapshots), Robert Rosenstone (The King of Odessa), Norman Mailer, William
Gass, Corman McCarthy, Pat Barker, and so on has to be set within the context of the

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post World War II discussion of Nazi crimes against humanity, the Genocide of the Jews
and Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally disabled—the whole question of the
meaning and significance of the Holocaust, the felt need to “come to terms with the
past,” not only in Europe but also in the rest of the colonial world, the demand by the
casualties, victims, and survivors of new kinds of events made possible by the very
science and culture that had allowed the West to destroy what it could not incarcerate,
domesticate, intimidate, or otherwise humble and humiliate. This widespread effort to
“come to terms with the past” involved not only the uncovering of what had ignored,
suppressed, repressed or otherwise hidden from view in the past of nations, classes, and
races and, yes, genders, too—it also entailed or seemed to many to entail the necessity
of thinking once more about the utility, the worth or value, the advantages and
disadvantages of the kind of knowledge of the past produced by the new cadres of
professional historians that had been established in the late nineteenth century for
service to the European nation-state but which, also, laid claim to the status of a
“science” (Wissenschaft) and authorized to determine what kinds of questions could be
asked by the present of the past, what kind of evidence could be adduced in any effort
to ask the proper questions, what constituted properly “historical” answers to those
questions, and where the line was to be drawn for distinguishing between a proper and
an improper use of historical “knowledge” in any effort to clarify or illuminate
contemporary efforts to answer central question of moral and societal concern: what
Kant called the “practical” (by which he meant the ethical) question: what should I (we)
do?
Now, it is here, at last for those of you who have been patiently waiting for me
to get around to the topic which I announced as the subject of this lecture, it is here that
I come to the subject of “the practical past.” It has been a long time coming but I had to
approach it by this route, through a discussion of the historical novel, of postmodernist
literary writing, and of Sebald’s particular take on history and the historical, in order to
be able to say something worthwhile about that statement of De Certeau that I have
used for my epigraph: “Fiction is the repressed other of history” or “The repressed other

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of history is fiction.” My argument, which I will not have time to develop as fully as I or
you might wish is that, yes, one of the ways that history in the early nineteenth century
succeeded in constituting itself as a scientific (or parascientific) discipline was by
detaching historiography from its millennial association with rhetoric and, after that,
belles letters, an activity of amateurs and dilettantes, a kind of writing that was more
“creative” or “poetic,” in which the imagination, intuition, passion, and, yes, even
prejudice were permitted to take precedent of considerations of veracity, perspicuity,
“plain” speech, and commonsense. So, à bas a la rhetorique! This, Victor Hugo’s
sentiment was shared by the proponents of what would come to be called “the realist
novel,” most prominently by Gustave Flaubert whose own brand of realism took the
form of a disparagement of rhetoric on behalf of what he called (and probably invented)
“style.” But the exclusion of rhetoric (considered as a theory of composition by which a
certain body of information was worked up for different practical uses, persuasion,
incitement to action, inspiration to feelings of reverence or repulsion, etc.), the
exclusion of rhetoric from historiology had an effect historical studies quite different
from what a similar exclusion of rhetoric from “literary writing” will have had on
“literature.”
The older, rhetorically structured mode of historical writing openly promoted the
study and contemplation of the past as propaideutic to a life in the public sphere, as an
alternative ground to theology and metaphysics (not to mention as an alternative to the
kind of knowledge one might derive from experience of what Aristotle called the
“banausic” life of commerce and trade), for the discovery or invention of principles by
which to answer the central question of ethics: what should (ought, must) I do? Or to
put it in Lenin’s terms: “What is to be done?”
Now, the professionalization of historical studies required in principle at least
that the past be studied, as it was said, “for itself alone” or as “a thing in itself,” without
any ulterior motive other than a desire for the truth (of fact, to be sure, rather than
doctrine) about the past and without any inclination to draw lessons from the study of
the past and import them into the present in order to justify actions and programs for

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the future. In other words, history in its status as a science for the study of the past
purported to purge

What is the practical past? The concept comes from some of the late writings of the
political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, and it refers to those notions of the past which
all of us carry around with us in our daily lives and which we draw upon, willy-nilly and
as best we can, for information, ideas, models, and strategies for solving all the practical
problems—from personal affairs to grand political programs—met with in whatever we
conceive to be our present “situation.” This is the past of memory, dream, and desire as
much as it is of problem-solving, strategy and tactics of living, both personal and
communal.
Oakeshott invokes the concept of the practical past as a basis for defining what
he calls “the historical past,” that past built up by modern professional historians as the
corrected and organized version part of the whole past which has been established as
having actually existed on the basis of evidence authenticated by other historians as
admissible in history’s court of appeal. The historical past is a theoretically motivated
construction, existing only in the books and articles published by professional historians;
it is constructed as an end in itself, possesses little or no value for understanding or
explaining the present, and provides no guidelines for acting in the present or
foreseeing the future. Nobody ever actually lived or experienced the historical past
because it could not have been apprehended on the basis of whatever it was that past
agents knew, thought, or imagined about their world during their present. Historians,
viewing the past from the vantage point of subsequent vantage point of a future state of
affairs, can claim a knowledge about the past present that no past agent in that present
could ever have possessed.
It was not always the case, of course. Historical writing in its origins was
supposed to teach lessons and provide models of comportment for living human beings
especially in the prosecution of public affairs. And this remained the case well into the
eighteenth century. But in the nineteenth century, historical studies ceased to have

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any practical utility precisely in the extent to which they succeeded in transforming into
a science. History can tell you what the properly processed evidence licenses you to
believe about what happened in given parts of the historical past, but it cannot tell you
how to deal with your present situation or solve your current practical problems. In
present situations, where judgment and decision are called for, the only past that is
useful is the one which Reinhart Koselleck called “the space of experience”
(Erfahrungsraum), that warehouse of archived memories, ideas, dreams, values which
we go to as a kind of “old curiosity shop” in search of intimations of where we came
from, in order to grasp, in some way, what we are to do with all the detritus left to us as
a legacy of dubious relevance to the solution of current “practical” problems.
Here the term “practical” is to be understood in Kant’s sense as born of the
uniquely human awareness of the necessity of doing something. We call upon the
practical past of memory, dream, fantasy, experience and imagination when confronted
with the question: “What ought I (or we) do?” The historical past cannot help us here,
because the most it can tell us is what people in other times, places, and circumstances
have done. This information contains no warrant for deducing what we, in our
situation, in our time and our place, should do in order to conform to the standard set
by that categorical imperative which licenses our belief in the possibility of morality
itself.
Now, in what follows, I am going to try to develop some of the implications of
Oakeshott’s distinction between the practical past and the historical past in order to try
to theorize a problem that has bedeviled philosophy of history since the beginning of
history’s transformation from its status as a discourse to its status as a (putative)
science. This problem arose in the early nineteenth century when, in order to constitute
itself as a science, history had to be detached and differentiated from its former
habitation in rhetoric. History’s alienation from rhetoric—of which it had formerly been
considered to be a branch, along with epistolography, philosophy, and romance (cfr.
Hugh Blair)—occurred at precisely the same time that literature or more accurately
“literary writing” was being detached and differentiated from rhetorics. “Literature”

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was differentiated from rhetoric by Flaubert and others by the elevation of style
conceived as the fusion in writing of perception and judgment over what had been
taken to be the formulaic modes of expression of classical oratory, on the one hand, and
the relatively chaotic or “spontaneous” outpourings of Romantic “genius,” on the other.
But—as Auerbach and others have shown—the notion of “literature” elaborated
over the course of the nineteenth century presumed a new “content” as well as new
“forms.” This content, formalized in the doctrine of “realism,” was nothing other than
what came to be called “historical reality”--no longer limited to “the past” but extended
to “the present” as well. If Auerbach is right, that “historism” which insisted on
regarding every aspect of the past “in its own terms” and “for itself alone,” without any
impulse to generalize or judge it by transtemporal values or criteria, this historistic
attitude is what informs and provides the ideology of literary realism and constitutes the
basis of the specific kind of knowledge which the (realist) novel is considered to be
capable of providing to the new social classes appearing in the wake of the French and
American Revolutions, the advent of capitalism, and the beginning of the great
European empires.
The modern novel has its origin in the early 18th century in the transformation of
the romance into a range of “how to live” manuals directed at middle class women left
at home and seeking instruction on “what must be done” in order to fulfill duties to
God, husband, family, and friends in the absence of class practices of the kind that gave
meaning to their peasant and aristocratic counterparts.ii The assumption of male control
over the development of the novel in the late eighteenth century transformed the novel
into, first, the Bildungsroman, and then, the novel of career, work, and love of classical
realism. Class differences, career choices, new modes of work and labor, new
sensibilities, indeed even new bodies suddenly appeared on the scene of “the historical
present,” and the realist novel, by the time it had taken the form and content given it by
Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thackeray, etc., embarked upon
that mapping of the new “historical reality” which taught four generations how to
conjure with that “past in the present” that Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Oscar

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Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Emile Zola would confront as an enigma which professional
historical learning could not solve because it had become limited to dealing with “the
facts” of the past. Small wonder that the next generation would, like Walter Benjamin,
view professional historical learning as itself the impediment to any effort to probe the
past of myth, memory, and dream as a resource for social and cultural renewal. History
had gone from being a resource to being the problem itself. (Not of course for
professional historians or most philosophers of history, but most certainly for writers,
poets, and dramatists.)iii Auerbach was surely right when he identified the content (or
ultimate referent) of the modern realist novel as “historical reality” but it was “the
practical past” rather than the “historical past” that the great novelists of the era were
bringing to life.

Critical reflexivity can be directed at many different aspects of a writing practice as

ancient and as venerable as historiography. One of the most important aspects of any
scholarly practice that should be subjected to criticism and self-criticism is that
congeries of presuppositions and assumptions which “go without saying,” so obvious
are they taken to be as foundational to the practice in question. In historical studies the
distinction between fact and fiction is one such topos. It is this distinction which, in
modern historical studies, presides over the opposition presumed to exist as a truth
beyond question, namely, that history and literature are in some way so radically
opposed to one another and that any mixture of them must undermine the authority of
the one and the value of the other.
And yet, and yet: the kind of storytelling which would subsequently come to be called
“history” arose within the kinds of cultural practices which would subsequently come to
be called “literature.” And even although history has tried over the course of the last
two centuries to become “scientific” and purge itself of the taint of its origins in
“literature” (and more specifically, rhetoric), it has never fully succeeded in this
endeavor. As the quotation from Certeau which I have chosen as the epigraph of this

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lecture suggests, history has been unable to articulate its claim to scientificity without
invoking “literature” as its antithetical other. It is this opposition of history to literature
that sustains the belief, crippling to history’s aspiration to serve as a “practical”
discipline, that the imagination has no place in historical research, thinking, or writing
about the past.
Recall that since its inception with Herodotus and Thucydides, history had been
conceived as a pedagogical and indeed practical discipline par excellence.iv As Foucault
has reminded us, history has always—until relatively recently—functioned more as a
practical, which is to say, an ethical discourse rather than as a science. In ancient,
modern and even in medieval times, historical discourse was recognized as a branch of
rhetoric, itself second only to theology as the site of the ethical question: what is to be
done? But as Michel de Certeau insisted, the transformation of historical studies into a
(pseudo-) science entailed its surrender of its authority to “teach philosophy by
example” and provide credible exemplars of those attributes deemed necessary to and
hence admirable by society.
True, its literary aspects were conceived to consist in the embellishments rhetorical and
poetic by which hard truths and onerous duties were made palatable by mythification.
Both Cicero and St. Augustine allowed the use of what we might call literary fictions in
the service of truth-telling, which justified the post-Reformation belief in the possibility
of distinguishing between a good or morally responsible fictions, on the one side, and a
sinful and degrading kind, on the other. With the transformation of history into a
science, however, fiction in general and literary fiction in particular came to be viewed
as the nefarious “other” of history and the kinds of truths about the past in which it
dealt. Indeed, in Ranke and his progeny, the newly named category of “literature”
(which included such genres as romance and the whole of rhetoric) was made to serve
as history’s negative, so that, by the late 20th century, in the field of history, history-
writing with distinct literary features was immediately recognizable as the work of
amateurs or, at best, as the product of a historical sensibility fallen prey to the lures of
fantasy.

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 Now, at the same time that history was morphing into a (pseudo-) science,
literature in general and the novel in particular were undergoing that revolution which
would subsequently be labeled “realist.” Realism has taken many different forms, but
modern literary realism differs from others by (what Auerbach calls” a “historist” frame
of mind, and more specifically by the extent to which writers such as Scott, Manzoni,
and Dumas, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, and Flaubert sought (quite in contrast to their
professional historian counterparts) to represent “the present as history.” As Auerbach
notes, this effort to represent the present as history had to appear anomalous, because
according to the doxa taking shape in professional historiography, historical knowledge
was and could only be about the past.v Knowledge of the past could not be generalized
and extended to the understanding of present circumstances much less those of the
future, without lapsing into ideological distortion and error. Thus, the novelists such as
Balzac and Flaubert and Dickens who viewed the present as both a consequence and
fulfillment of the historical past and, at the same time, as undergoing changes caused by
the very processes that had produced the past violated the taboo of crossing the gap
that separated the past from the present and allowed the present to be experienced as
a stable platform from which the turmoil and conflict of the past could be contemplated
sine ira et studio, as from a quiet and stable shore after a long passage at sea. The
treatment of the present as history in realist literature effectively divided up the
temporal continuum between historists and presentists, with the former consigned the
task of mapping out the past in all its contingency and particularity and the latter
assuming the role of “historicist” analysts of the new social reality emerging from the
recent past of Revolution and Reaction. Indeed, the realist novel became the site where
a newly legitimated dominant class could rehearse its role in the drama of desire’s
conflict with necessities which past generations had never dreamed of. Ironically, the
more that history actually succeeded in transforming itself into a (kind of) science,
objectivist, empiricist, particularist, the more remote the knowledge of past which it
produced became for generations confronting new social realities. And with the
demystification of the world of the bourgeosie effected by Marx, Darwin, and Freud,

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“history” alone remained as that reserve of fact and reality on which to base an idea of
the present and a vision of a possible future. Whence the flourishing of what
professional historians would contemn as “philosophy of history,” born of the effort to
generalize and synthesize the particular truths turned up by professional historians in
their plundering of the archives of old Europe. It is seldom noticed that growing up
alongside of and mirroring the same drives that impelled to the creation of “philosophy
of history” (Comte, Hegel, Buckle, Marx, Spencer, Taine, on to Spengler, Toynbee, T.
Lessing, Vogelin, Croce, Gentile, and the rest) was another and more authoritative idea
of what history and a temporality parsed by historical categories consisted of. This
other idea of history erected alongside of and against the history of the historians
flourished in literature, in poetry and drama, to be sure, but also and especially in the
realist novel. And it resulted over time in the creation of a past quite different from that
which served as the object of interest of professional historians. This was “the practical
past” of my title, a past which, unlike that of the historians, has been lived by all of us
more or less individually and more or less collectively and which serves as the basis for
the kinds of perceptions of situations, solutions of problems, and judgments of value
and worth that we must make in everyday situations of the kind never experienced by
the “heroes” of history.

The distinction between “the historical past” and “the practical past” is useful for
distinguishing between modern professional historians’ approaches to the study of the
past and the ways in which lay persons and practitioners of other disciplines call upon,
recall, or seek to use “the past” as a “space of experience”vi (Koselleck) to be drawn
upon as a basis for all kinds of judgments and decisions in daily life. The practical past is
made up of all those memories, illusions, bits of vagrant information, attitudes and
values which the individual or the group summons up as best they can to justify, dignify,
excuse, alibi, or make a case for actions to be taken in the prosecution of a life project.
The political, legal, and religious pasts can seldom be approached except by way of
ideology or parti pris of some kind. These kinds of past can be said to belong to

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“history,” no doubt about it, but they are seldom amenable to professional historians’
techniques of investigation. Since such pasts are invested less in the interest of
establishing the facts of a given matter than that of providing a basis in fact from which
to launch a judgment of action in the present, they themselves cannot be handled
according to the principle of “first the facts, then the interpretation” so dear to the
professional historian’s heart. For in inquiries into these kinds of past, what is at issue is
not so much “what are the facts?” as, rather, what will be allowed to count as a fact
and, beyond that, what will be permitted to pass for a specifically “historical” as against
a merely “natural” (or for that matter, a “supernatural”) event.
The practical past, according to Oakeshott,vii is a version of the past that most of
us carry around with us in our minds and draw on in the performing of our daily tasks
where we are compelled to judge situations, solve problems, make decisions, and more
importantly perhaps respond to the consequences of decisions made both by us and for
us by those institutions of which we are more or less conscious members. Oakeshott
thought that the principal difference between the historical past and the practical past
lay in the kinds of purposes motivating inquiry into them. The historical past was that
past which could be studied scientifically, disinterestedly, as an end in itself and “for its
own sake.” Ideally—and this was the founding gesture of modern scientific
historiography—the historical past was not inquired into for any ulterior reason other
than the determination of what it really consisted of, how it understood itself, and what
had happened in and to it to give it its peculiar configuration, outline, or trajectory of
development.
Above all, the historical past taught no lessons of any interest to the present, it was an
object of strictly impersonal, neutral, and in the best cases, objective interest. Finally,
the historical past was a past constructed by historians. It existed in books and scholarly
essays only. Its authenticity—though not its reality-- was guaranteed by other
professional historians cleaving to the gild’s conventions for the handling of evidence
and the investigation of documents and possessing the authority to determine what was
legitimate history and what was not. No one had ever lived the historical past because

15
historians were in possession of a wider range and a kind of evidence (or knowledge)
that no agent of the real past could ever have possessed. The study of the historical
past yields no laws of historical causation and very little in the line of generalization or
typification. The historical past is made up of discrete events the factuality of which has
been established on deliberative grounds and the relations among which are more or
ess contingent. The use of narrative to represent sets of such discrete events is justified
on the basis of the fact that historical events are time and space (or place) specific and
can therefore be presented realistically (if not truthfully) either as diachronic sequences
or as synchronic structures.
All of this in contrast to “the practical past” which is elaborated in the service of “the
present,” is related to this present in a practical way, and from which, therefore, we can
draw lessons and apply them to the present, to anticipate the future (or at least the
proximate future), and provide reasons if not justification for actions to be taken in the
present on behalf of a future better than the current dispensation.

Now, it must be stressed that these two kinds of past are rather more ideal typifications
than descriptions of actual points of view or ideologies. Moreover, it must be noted
that professional historiography was set up (in the early 19th century) in the universities
to serve the interests of the nation-state, to help in the work of creating national
identities, and was used in the training of educators, politicians, imperial administrators,
and both politicial and religious ideologues in manifestly “practical” ways. The famous
“history as philosophy teaching by examples” and “historia magistra vitae” of
nineteenth century European culture was the same history that professional historians
brokered as a past studied for itself alone and in its own terms, sine ira et studio. But
this seeming duplicitousness on the part of professional historians was fully consonant
with the contemporary ideology of science, which viewed the natural sciences as
nothing if not both “disinterested” and “practical” or socially beneficial at one and the
same time. Such a view of science was consistent with the reigning philosophies of
positivism and utilitarianism which contributed to the transformation of a scientific

16
world view into a whole Weltanschauung, which allowed “history” in general to be
conceived as offering unimpeachable proof of the progress of civilization and the
triumph of the white races of the world.
Of course, over the arc of the 20th century, this myth of progress and the social
Darwinism that sustained it were submitted to devastating critique. To which
professional historiography responded by retreating into a kind of commonsensical
empiricism as justification for the neutrality and disinterestedness with which it
composed its ideologically anodyne pictures of the historical past. This empiricism
allowed professional historiography to continue to trumpet its ideological neutrality
(“just the facts, and nothing but the facts”) while disdaining “philosophy of history” of
the kind inherited from Comte, Hegel and Marx and promoted by Spengler, Toynbee,
and Croce over the span of the two World Wars, as mere “ideology” or as religious
prophecy masquerading as “historical science.” *cfr. Popper, Collingwood, etc.+

Now, philosophy of history—however prophetic, predictive, or apocalyptic it may be—

was not in general intended as an alternative to what is called “straight history.” Most
philosophers of history—from Hegel on—regarded their work as an extension of or
supplement to the work of ordinary historians. They saw themselves as providing
procedures for summarizing, synthesizing, or symbolizing the myriads of works written
by working historians in order to derive some general principles regarding the nature of
human beings’ existence with others in time. Whether they did this adequately or not is
a moot point. Because whether philosophers of history have used the knowledge and
information cooked up by ordinary historians well or badly is not a matter for historians
to decide—anymore than it is a matter for physicists to decide how the knowledge they
produce may be put to use by engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, or for that matter
military establishments. Surely there is no difference between a philosopher’s
ruminations on the nature of art based on his considerations of specific art objects and
the work of historians of art and the use of historians’ works to try to divine not so much

17
the meaning in history as, rather, the kinds of meanings that can be derived from the
study of a historians’ writings.
In any event, I do not wish to follow this line of discussion because, as history shows us,
genuine historians are chary of philosophy of history for their own good reasons, and
there seems to be little chance of bringing them onto common ground in the
foreseeable future. But it has to be said that, whatever else it may be, philosophy of
history belongs to the class of disciplines meant to bring order and reason to a
“practical past” rather than to that “historical past” constructed by professional
historians for the edification of their peers in their various fields of study.

But this differentiation between the past constructed by historians and that constructed
by philosophers of history permits insight, or so it seems to be, into a relationship that
has been particularly worrisome in modern Western scientific culture, namely, the
relationship between fact and fiction (sometimes referred to as that between history
and literature) within the context of cultural modernism.
In the many discussions of postmodernism that have taken place since Lyotard’s famous
essay on the topic,viii few people have thought it important to notice that the dominant
genre and mode of postmodernist writing is the (neo) historical novel.ix To be sure,
mainstream critics lamented what was taken to be an unfortunate (not to say
disastrous) mixture (or scumbling) of the distinction between fact and fiction or reality
and fantasy, for it seemed to violate a taboo that had sustained the possibility of a
certain kind of “serious” fiction writing, by which I mean a kind of (modernist) writing
took the relation between past and present (or memory and perception) as its principal
object of interest. I refer to the work of the first generation of modernist writers as
represented by Conrad, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Kafka, Stein, Gide, etc., etc.,
all of whom seemed to turn against “history” as a cause rather than a solution to the
problem of how to deal with a present oppressed by the remains of the past. Literary
modernism has been charged in recent years with a kind of narcissistic “presentism,”
with a defective sense of history, with a retreat into irrationalism and psychosis, a

18
disdain for the truth of fact, and return to what T. S. Eliot, in his review of Joyce’s
Ulysses, praised as “the mythic method.” a flight from history, a

But the revival in the second half of the twentieth century of the early nineteenth
century genre of the historical novel (Scott, Manzoni, Dumas, Balzac) raises questions
about its ideological significance. Moreover, the fact that it is the historical novel rather
than any of the other genres (Epistolary, Gothic, Bildungsroman, Realist, etc.) that might
have been revived raises questions about the status of that “history” which is used to
indicate the kind of novel which the postmodernists have chosen for the presentation of
life “in modern times.” In other words, in choosing the genre of the “historical novel,”
postmodernist writers as different as Pynchon, Mailer, Capote, De Lillo, P. Roth, Pat
Barker, W. G. Sebald, Coetzee, Grass, Danilo Kis, Robert Rosenstone, William Gass, etc.,
etc., and any number of others challenged the dogma which made of “historical facts”
the standard by which to assess the realism of any discourse about the real past or
present.
Recall that the archetypal historical novel, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley or ‘Tis Sixty Years
Since (1805, pub.1814) apologetically violated the taboo on mixing historical fact with
fantasy or romance in his account of the adventures of a “normal” young man who
enters into the service of George II of England, is sent to the Highlands of Scotland, and
finds passion, love, adventure, and indeed commits treason and murder before being
returned to the fold of a social order that will emerge from the Napoleonic Wars with a
new ruling elite and worldwide empire. The novel openly asks the question as to what
had been gained and lost to the British people by the transition to modernity, as
represented by the suppression of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Edward Waverley is,
as it were, run through a number of tests and put over a number of hurdles and in the
process allows Scott to explicate the virtues and vices of the older culture of the Scottish
or Highlands clans and an assess the weaknesses and strengths of the emergent social
order. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the novel was condemned for mixing
fact and fancy in such a way as to endow them with the same tincture or color. This was

19
bad enough—in a moral sense—but beyond this Scott consciously violated what would
soon become an element of orthodoxy in the emergent ideology of historism: the use of
anachronism. Young Edward Waverley has the forma mentis of a young gentleman of
Scott’s own time, rather than that of a young gentleman of modest means of mid 18 th
century, while every other figure in the novel is given the aura or mystique of Highlands
culture of long ago. This technique of anachronism continued to be used down to the
late nineteenth century to dramatize what Lukacs called the “dialectical relation” and
what Benjamin would take to be the “dialectical image” of a time and place undergoing
profound changes of a specifically historical kind. Although the book and the genre of
the historical novel were a great success. the mixture of fact and fiction was condemned
not only by historians but by moralists in general.x The mixture of fact and fiction was
regarded as not only mistaken but morally offensive.

At the same time, of course, the profession of historical studies was finding its own new
orthodoxy and becoming transformed into the official custodian of “the past,” but a
past which differed from the past of both memory and fantasy, a past which would
come to be called “the historical past.” The use of the term “historical” as a modifier of
the substantive “past” indicates an exclusion and a condensation: an exclusion of any
other past from the “historical” and a condensation of the past as only historical. From
now on, the past of nature, of animality, and of humanity, even the pasts of all those
“histories” which existed before the invention of “History,” will be shunted aside and
measured, for their truth and their reality, against the pure past of “history.” The idea
of a specifically historical past, different from the rest of the past, the past not
authenticated by “historical learning,” is the substance of the idea of historism
(Historismus). In the mapping of this past, the imagination has no part (cfr.Hobsbawm).
Once I had the temerity to suggest that historical writing was not so much opposed to
literary writing as rather related to it in the manner of what Wittgenstein called a family
resemblance. After all, traditional historical writing (cast in the mode and genre of the
narrative) manifestly resembled such genres of fiction as the epic, the romance, the

20
comedy, tragedy, and indeed myth in general. And insofar as the form (or container) of
an utterance had to be considered as an element of its content (referent or substance),
then the genre of the history could claim no exemption from the charge of fictionalizing
any more than a fairy tale could do.
Of course, anyone who thought that the form and the content of a discourse could be
dissociated and each criticized on its own terms without significant loss of meaning
would not buy this argument. Especially those who had a disciplinary investment in
maintaining the essential difference--to the point of an itresolvable opposition--
between fact and fiction. It offended common sense if not critical theory to suggest
that while the main content of a historical discourse might very well be “facts,” its form
was the stuff of fiction and that, therefore, its overall message inevitably consisted of a
mixture of fact and fiction.
The metafiction of the historical narrative consisted of something like this: Here is a
congeries of facts organized for presentation as if they were (or had the form of) a
literary and more specifically a fictional thing. The form of the story is just there to make
the information (facts and arguments about the facts, their nature, relationships, etc.)
more palatable. So read and enjoy but once you are done, kick away the fictional ladder
on which you have climbed and contemplate the facts in themselves for what they tell
you about a “form of life” now dead and past.
Now, obviously the separation of fact and fiction in the act of reading a discourse of any
kind is not so easy. Indeed, as almost everyone would grant, the story form imports
particular kinds of valorization, most especially of an emotive or affectual kind, into the
account of whatever has been posited as the referent. The same set of events can be
emplotted as a tragedy or as a romance with a shift of point of view or perspective (i.e.,
mode) and it matters whether a given set of events is presented in a voice that is ironic
or sentimental or reverent, and so on. Indeed, even diction (word choice) and the
tropes of grammar tincture the presentation and tilt reception in different directions.
Everyone knows this, but it is hard to swallow if you are committed to telling the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in what you say.

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Of course, I now recognize that I made a mistake by suggesting that the problem
consisted of the relationship between two substances, “fact” on the one hand, “fiction”
on the other. I might well have said that the problem had to do with a discourse
(history) that wished to be faithful to its referent but which had inherited conventions of
representation that produced meaning in excess of what it literally asserted of a kind
that were identifiably literary if not fictionalizing in their effects. I hasten to add that I
am not prepared to extend this idea beyond the domain of historical discourse which
typically has to do with referents that are past and hence no longer open to empirical
inspection. And it would not be very important if historical discourse had not quietly
slipped into the place formerly occupied by religion and metaphysics and become a kind
of degree zero of factuality on which the other human and social sciences could draw as
a fund of what Foucault calls “empiricities” for the kinds of operations they want to
carry out in the creation of their lore about what human being might be. History has
fulfilled an important social role in limiting itself to establishing what really happened in
discrete domains of the past and resisting any impulse to draw lessons for the present
or, God forbid, daring to predict what lies in store for us in the future. But history reads
us moral lessons, whether we would have it or not, simply by virtue of the casting of its
accounts of the past in the form of stories. More generally, it performs this operation
simply by its use of natural language to describe its objects of interest and report the
historians’s thoughts about what these objects really are, what they did or what
happened to them, and how they came to assume the shapes they have assumed in the
discourses we write about them. This is because natural languages come laden with a
cargo of connotation over which writers and speakers have no control and which
scatters meaning over reference quite as randomly as Jackson Pollock spattered buckets
of paint over a canvas from atop his step ladder. And this is as true of historical
documents as it is of a historian’s own prose.

i
Michel Certeau, “History and Science,” Heterologies (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 219.

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ii
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
iii
See Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Chap. 1.
iv
See Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, “After Learning from History,” In 1926: Living at the Edge
of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). pp. 411-36.
v
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), Chs. 17-18.
vi
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1985), p. 21ff.
vii
Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Libety Fund, 1999),pp.
1-48.
viii
J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984).
ix
For a survey both of the postmodernist novel in the West and the theoretical issues
raised by the revival of the historical novel as a dominant genre, see Amy Elias, Sublime
Desire: History and Post-1960 Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001). Some time ago, Linda Hutcheon pointed out that the postmodernist novel was
given to the production of what she called “historiographical metafiction,” which she
charfacterized as showing “fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be
discursively structured" A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York:
Routledge, 1988), p.120)
x
Emily Sutherland remarks that von Ranke took exception to the novels of Walter Scott,
on the grounds that they were historically inaccurate, although, as Curthoys and Docker
remind us, he did grudgingly appreciate Scott’s novels: “In his ‘Autobiographical
Dictation’ (November 1885), a year before he died, Ranke noted that the ‘romantic-
historical works’ of Sir Walter Scott, which found a reception in all languages and all
nations, contributed principally toward awakening a participation in the deeds and
achievements of the past’. Scott was important for inspiring a nineteenth-century
interest in history, and his novels were, Ranke admits,‘attraction enough for me, and I
read these works with lively interest ...’ *But+ he found himself ‘offended’ by the way
Scott had knowingly created historical portraits that ‘seemed even in particular details,
to be completely contradictory to the historical evidence’.” See Sutherland, “Is truth
more interesting than fiction? The conflict between veracity and dramatic impact in
historical fiction,” “The A and Is Papers,” AAWP, 2007, p. 2.

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